Prozodia, semantyka, styl – o hierarchii poziomów ekwiwalencji w tłumaczeniu piosenki kabaretowej (studium przypadku: polskojęzyczne warianty Money… Freda Ebba)

Prosody, Semantics and Style. On the Hierarchy of Levels of Equivalence in the Translation of Cabaret Songs (Case Study: Polish Versions of Fred Ebb's Money…) The article is a case study and contains a comparative analysis of four variants of the Polish translation of Fred Ebb and John Kander’s song Money… from the musical “Cabaret”. The author of the translation is Wojciech Młynarski, one of the most respected Polish songwriters of the second half of the twentieth century. In the study, an assumption is made that Młynarski, who repeatedly changed versions of his translation, sought to create the most faithful rendition of the songs from the musical for the needs of the Polish stage. His efforts can be observed at four levels of text organization. The translator aimed mainly for sound equivalence, i.e. conformity with the original song in terms of rhythm (word stress), rhyme (consonance) and voice instrumentation and, to a lesser extent, sound imitation. He also cared about pragmatic equivalence by rendering into Polish the original intentions, with particular emphasis on the modes of indirect communication, such as irony and satire. However, other aspects of equivalence remained in the background. Not everywhere the translator managed to keep the cognitive equivalence, i.e. convergence of imagery, by translating scenes and scenarios that were part of cultural knowledge into parallel ones and, more broadly, by trying to evoke similar images in the mind of the reader and listener. His efforts to achieve the effect of broadly understood stylistic equivalence were also noteworthy; only to a small extent they consisted in giving the right stylistic coloring to the individual lexical items which had their English equivalents, and they mainly boiled down to translating stylistic games that did not necessarily cover the same fragments of the song, though were usually based on the same mechanism (a clash between low and high style, absurdity). The analysis shows that the translator adopted tabular rather than linear approach to the original.

KEITH HUMBLE (1927–1995)Eight Cabaret Songs (1985–1989)

This chapter introduces eight cabaret songs by Keith Humble. These songs are quirkily original and distinctly offbeat. Humble has said that, rather than representing cabaret tradition, the pieces are redolent of the period in France just after the Second World War, when groups of artists engaged in political and existential discussion. The texts themselves concern the eternal themes of love and death. As may be expected, piano parts are especially striking and wide-ranging in character. The work’s history is somewhat chequered, however: Humble originally wrote five songs, but added others later, adjusting their order over time. The last is by far the most elaborate.

Parade

A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. According to Jean Cocteau, the poet who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the impetus for Parade originated in 1912 with Diaghilev’s command, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ To fulfill Diaghilev’s mandate, Cocteau assembled a production team drawn from the Parisian avant-garde: for the score, he recruited the composer Erik Satie, known for experimental piano compositions such as Gymnopédies (1888) and for cabaret songs performed at the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1916, Cocteau secured the participation of Pablo Picasso, a painter associated with the Cubist movement of the early 1910s, to design the overture curtain, set, and costumes. Working with the choreographer Léonide Massine, this group produced a ballet-pantomime featuring familiar characters from the circus, variety shows, and cinema. Mixing various forms of art and entertainment, Parade used dance to explore the unstable relationship between elite and popular culture.

Tucholsky, Dr Kurt (1890–1935)

Kurt Tucholsky was an important and widely-read author, poet, satirist, and editor of small literary forms during the Weimar Republic. He was a prolific writer of satires, cabaret songs, and poems that bespoke the specific scenes of Berlin and Germany between the World Wars. Today he is widely known for two playful, erotic romances, Rheinsberg and Schloß Gripsholm, both of which he wrote after romantic weekend escapes with lovers. Tucholsky called for a radical renewal of German culture and society in his articles for the Weltbühne and the Vossische Zeitung, always adjusting his tone and argument with an eye to his audiences. After his military service in the First World War, Tucholsky became a powerful voice for bourgeois, left-wing humanism, and an active, antimilitarist, anti-fascist, anti-dogmatist, and enemy of demagogues. His use of transparent pseudonyms offered no protection against political and legal persecution, and his constant travels led him to live in Berlin, Paris, Denmark, and Sweden, where he settled and died of a narcotic overdose in a hospital in 1935.

The Boy Wonder of Broadway

After dropping out of Columbia, Latouche attempted to make his career on Broadway. One very early effort included contributions to the satire The Murder in the Old Red Barn. He also worked for a while as a press agent for the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. His work on Erika Mann’s Pepper Mill, which included adapting German texts and appearing on stage, marked his growing involvement with the refugee community. His transgressive cabaret songs established a following, but his first big break came with interpolations in the labor musical Pins and Needles.

Postmodern Interpretations of Satie's Parade

If postmodernism can be considered ahistorically, as a stylistic category operative at any time and in any place, then there are many older works that suddenly seem to speak strongly to our present age. This paper argues the case for taking Erik Satie as a postmodernist: his music is marked by bricolage (the E-driophthalma movement from Embryons desséchés, 1913, borrows a theme, according to the score, "from a celebrated mazurka by Schubert"); by polystylism (the cabaret songs written for Vincent Hyspa, or Parade with its quotation from Irving Berlin); and by materialism of the signifier (what Satie calls furniture music).